jqcoffey

Hey, thanks Matt for providing a well lit path to getting things done on the Internet before anyone knew what they were doing.

For vintage Apple gear to buy, sell or inquire about checkout 68kmla.org.

I had success selling a maxed out Power Mac 6100 there that went nowhere on EBay.

I can't plus this enough. I hired a unicorn business minded, brilliant, can solve any software engineering or UI/UX problem engineer who happened to have a predilection for functional programming.

I found out that unicorns are unicorns.

Yes you’re right. I guess I was mostly trying to underscore the point you’re making here by being a smidge provocative. +1.

> Work with honest, intelligent people

This is good advice that’s well intentioned, but (sorry), it can be interpreted as elitist, and in a way that’s detrimental to the reader.

I am no way suggesting that this is the intention or belief of the parent, but while I’ve got more miles on my odometer than I’d prefer, they’ve informed me that “reasonable” is better than “intelligent.”

My god how I’ve found that working with reasonable people is so much healthier, more productive and rewarding than working with the unreasonable* intelligent folks.

*I fully grant to my current and former colleagues, friends and associates that I have been irredeemably unreasonable any number of times. Consider this a small thanks :).

Scientific American is still in print. I guess I don’t know for how long, but I love it.

And here I thought burn out was the inability to do something. Learn something new every day!

I had no idea Haynes was doing this. Hysterical and wonderful. Thank you!

I suppose I’m a grey beard (in industry is 96ish) and I mean, it’s fine as a backend language in so far as dynamically (or even loosely) typed languages go. It’s just as easy (or hard) to write modular well tested code as in any number of other languages in wide use for backend services, in my XP.

> I don't have any particular answers to why string templating has been enduringly popular so far (although I can come up with theories, including that string templating is naturally reusable to other contexts, such as plain text)

My hunch is that it’s for the same reason folks love other plaintext formats: they’re readable and easily manipulated.

HTML has the added upside that it’s pretty straightforward for humans to write, which whether one likes it or not is why some folks would rather not learn some else’s DSL for generating it.

Btw, I suspect there’s a similar division in the write your own SQL vs ORM/linq world.

My tactic is to meditate on the fact that there is always someone better than me at some thing that I’m doing at some point in time.

Learned this lesson mostly from sports, fwiw.

does this count as an example of the Two (AI) Generals' Problem?

I appear the only one here who tells someone else (relevant) about my “brilliant” ideas from walks and showers.

It’s often my wife about a thing related to our lives, but can be something work related that I share that morning with a trusted colleague or even an email to a friend.

I think the author is describing analysis paralysis. They’re right in the sense that the most complicated work (in my XP) is often demystified with a bit of engineering over white boarding and whatifing.

A long time ago I was in a fairly desperate technical situation, that to my and my lead’s minds required a stop the world, must fix or all’s lost approach.

Product wasn’t having it, and I couldn’t negotiate my way through. In the end we ignored them for the ~4 months needed to get back to systems health. We produced a retro of our findings, before and after states, etc. and consensus, from clients and even from product leadership, was that we did the right thing.

My PM ended up quitting and I permanently broke that relationship.

The best advice I ever received was: you were right. Was it worth it?

I started doing impactful things by listening to friends express a need for something (like a shopping cart for their auto parts catalog circa 1998) and just doing it (they of course offered to pay me). I had no real clue what I was doing in code at that time, and had to learn a ton to get the job done.

Looking back on my career, taking vague requirements and turning them into something useful after a hard slog through unfamiliar territory is pretty much the common thread in all my successes.

oh my, yes, thank you!

The value of benevolence of shopkeepers to their younger patrons cannot be understated. As a young kid I learned how PCs were put together from the local clone shop on San Pablo Ave in El Cerrito. I bought a 286 with 512k ram and two floppies and got to watch it be assembled and tested. Later (1989ish) I spent every moment I could at a Macintosh shop on Shattuck Ave in Berkeley playing SimCity on a then unheard of 20” color monitor (at least I recall it being that large). Today I’m at Google and just prior I was at Apple. The link is not direct, but the latter does not exist without the former (there was also a C64 prior to the 286, though without the shopkeeper story), at least in my case.

The author appears to be an EM at Booking.com. It seems unlikely that anyone at Booking would be working on SSD firmware or drivers, but a CDN seems like a reasonable assumption and also a useful place to plumb the depths of SSD implementations.

I’m surprised that folks are still considering metrics like LoC and commit frequency to measure developer productivity, even more so due to the (anecdotal, from my XP of 25 years in industry) fact that as developers gain in seniority they are typically spending more time with people than with code.

IMHO, developer productivity is best judged by the humans they work with.

The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein.

Principally the thing it did right, having lived through the era, is bring a real video game home with Super Mario Bros.

At the time I had a C64 and an Atari 2600, but would spend every quarter I could dig up at the arcade at the bowling alley next door playing pretty much anything, but especially Super Mario Bros.

The Nintendo was the first console to bring the arcade home and it was absolutely revolutionary.

I for one, as a mid-life gen-x-er, can't wait to welcome our new gen-z design overlords if it means that we bring some visual variety back to computing.

My small input to this debate: I know I certainly bought—-actually paid for—-magazines like Computer Shopper just to browse the ads. I think many folks on HN of my generation likely did the same.

I suppose the most obvious games to recommend would be Master of Orion and X-COM: UFO Defense.

From the comments it seems like there's a bit of an information gap in terms of how email service providers (ESPs) like Mailgun operate, what data they must have routine access to, and how the space evolved to make money (this last part of my info is dated as I left the space about a decade ago).

First, ESPs send email on a client's behalf. One of the primary benefits of using an ESP is co-opting their email reputation and their contacts with real time blacklist (RBL) operators, postmaster organizations at major email providers and third party email reputation groups. A good reputation keeps a sender's email out of the junk folder (or worse refused/dropped on the floor) and is really all most folks care about (especially at an API driven company like Mailgun).

In order to do all of the above, an ESP needs access to the details of the email that's being sent, including recipient email addresses and the contents of the message being sent. This is because both of those things can potentially be dangerous and the ESP is the ultimate responsible party in the eyes of the receiving email provider (i.e. Google holds Mailgun as the responsible party for what Phabricator sends).

Now, as to this sales call, sometime ago (circa ~2004 I guess) it became apparent that ESPs could work with their problematic clients to improve their sending habits, thereby improving their reputation and collect more money from the client in the process (via either direct consulting fees or increased sending volume). This kind of win-win made a lot of sense, but as the price-per-email sent was dropping ESPs were looking for ways to reliably generate more revenue and, well, "deliverability consulting" became a thing. My guess is that this is what this email exchange was about, and like any consulting effort, it's only as good as the last interaction and here I agree with Evan that "Joe" fumbled the ball fairly badly.

Personally, I would have just reached out to Mailgun support and asked what's up with the incorrect billing and Joe's problematic responses, but that doesn't appear to have been Evan's first choice.

Source for the industry insider info is that I used to run the technical side of a small ESP from about 2003 to 2009, was an active participant in MAAWG and generally had to work with my peers across orgs to navigate deliverability problems regularly.

> Either that, or the ability to use a car as a battery.

Not sure if it fits the bill for you, but the new Ford F-150 lightning can supply 9.6kw of continuous power:

> With the ability to offload 9.6 kilowatts of power, Ford Intelligent Backup Power keeps the lights on during an outage while providing security by powering home appliances, security systems and more

Ref: https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2021...

Some comments suggest this is as a result of A/B testing, which may be part of the story today, but as someone who built websites that had to deal with returning large resultsets from time immemorial (i.e. pre-dot com bubble), it absolutely started because Netscape would simply blow up rendering tables larger than N rows (where N ain’t very large) and because partial rendering didn’t work very well with table based layout. The former meant you could crash a viewer’s browser while the latter meant anything more than say 20 rows would take eons to load over a dialup modem.

This all changed with the advent of infinite scrolling enabled via the whole ajax revolution, but this was (is still? I haven’t written front end code in a decade or so) difficult to get right.

In sum, this happened because of technical difficulties on the front end side (browser limitations or code complexity), and probably just stuck as convention. Perhaps some nice analyst then A/B tested the arrangement and found that it was happily optimal.

I worked for a local ISP in the 90’s and can tell you you were not the only one. In my memory 56k modems were rarely reliably better than 33.6ks. Myself I seem to recall feeling luck to get around 40k connections.

I know we’re a small community overall, but I’m really (probably naively) surprised that a publication like Byte is no longer viable.

The Linux whatever’s, PC whatever’s and Mac whatever’s, and even Communications of ACM and the equivalents just aren’t the same thing.